Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Factory

Teachers, and perhaps especially teachers of English, understand how difficult it often is to convince young people that writing is a worthwhile activity. This is especially true where there is little incentive beyond ‘this will improve your final grades’ – always the last resort of a desperate teacher – but I wonder whether the opportunities afforded by access to the Web have just introduced a whole new set of challenges as well as opportunities. Could it be that unless teachers can guarantee a real purpose and audience for those youngsters who are already motivated to write – possibly via wikis and blogs – they will increasingly look elsewhere for more meaningful outlets?

In Convergence Culture – Where Old and New Media Collide, the American author Henry Jenkins considers the shift which new technologies have brought in the way we think of our relationship to media, and how the skills we acquire initially through play may have implications for how we learn, work, participate in the political process and connect with other people around the world. Dismissing talk of a ‘digital revolution’, he prefers instead to think of a ‘digital evolution’ where popular storytelling increasingly takes place across different media platforms (transmedia), in a world where passive consumers have been replaced by active participants or ‘players’.

In the chapter Why Heather Can Write, Jenkins examines the phenomenon known as ‘fan fiction’, and the ways in which it exemplifies the new media landscape. On fan fiction websites like Fiction Alley for example, the largest of a number of websites dedicated to fans of Harry Potter, young writers come together to write, collaborate and share stories about their favourite characters, and sometimes to invent new characters of their own. New writers are mentored by an army of unpaid volunteers known a ‘beta readers’ – a term derived from the world of technology where ‘beta’ means ‘in development’ – and criticism, while it is always positive and constructive, is also focused and direct, dealing with issues of grammar and style as well as plotlines. The beta readers are also contributing authors and what all the writers have in common is that they are looking to improve their work, not simply to have it praised. On another fan fiction site, FanFiction.Net, beta reader Cat Foxglove describes her strengths as ‘Very picky about grammar and continuity. If tenses constantly change, words are continually misspelled, or the very flow of a story contradicts itself, I have no problem saying so.’ Night Monkey, who describes herself as a college writing major from Pennsylvania has written 23 stories for Batman and Dr Who, and says in her beta profile, ‘I’ll read just about whatever you’d care to give me, but I would prefer humor above all else. I’m also, oddly enough, a fan of horror. If you do fanfiction based off (sic) books, there’s a good chance I’ve read or at least heard of it. I’d be tickled to work with Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, or Stephen King fanfiction. I won’t say no to Twilight, but don’t bring me senseless crap.’

This relationship between learner and mentor, based on the trust of peers on what is effectively a shared journey is, by definition, quite different from the formal teacher-pupil relationship found in school and allows the young writers to experiment with their craft within the safe confines of a pre-existing fictional world. For many of the writers who contribute to the fan community, the journey begins by simply reading the efforts of others, before they are comfortable enough to submit their own stories. Once they are committed however, the feedback provides the incentive for them to develop and improve. They quickly come to regard themselves as real ‘authors’.

Critics of fan fiction argue that it is unoriginal and imitative, but as Jenkins points out, this kind of ‘apprenticeship’ model is common in other cultural spheres, and historically young artists learned their craft by initially imitating the great masters, sometimes contributing to their work, before establishing styles, techniques and content of their own. Whether the same conditions for writing can be created within a formal school setting, is a different matter. Again, as Jenkins points out:

“Schools have less flexibility to support writers at very different stages of their development. Even the most progressive schools set limits on what students can write compared to the freedom they enjoy on their own. Certainly, teens may receive harsh critical responses to their more controversial stories when they publish them online, but the teens themselves are deciding what risks they want to take and facing the consequences of those decisions.”

Armed with this knowledge, it might be tempting for teachers either to write off fan fiction entirely as inferior or worthless (despite its massive popularity), or to wholeheartedly encourage their students to get involved and even to join them in the endeavour, but the growth in such online communities raises a number of questions for teachers and schools. Could it be that part of the attraction of fan fiction writing and its devotees is that they are outwith the formal structures of the education system? Should teachers simply accept that there are some elements of a young person’s literary (and literacy) development which should be left alone, and, whether or not teachers embrace the new orthodoxy which determines that we are all learning together, will there always be a gap between formal and informal learning? I’d be interested to hear your views.

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20 thoughts on “Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Factory”

Great post, and one that reflects some of my own thinking on writing and audience. Coincidentally, a colleague of mine uses Convergence Culture as the primary text in his College Composition II class, and he’s been very successful with it.

Hi Mark,
Thanks for dropping by and thanks for the comments. I only recently discovered Jenkins – and consequently fan fiction – as I was researching ‘transmedia’, so it has been a bit of an eye-opener for me. I would be really interested to know what percentage of teenagers in the US and the UK are involved in fan fiction in one way or another and the extent to which their teachers are aware of it.

Although it irrefutably teaches writing through practice, 95% of the time, a fanfiction is written about characters, not plot. “Shipping” is the fan term for romantically pairing characters together, and most fanfiction exists to tell a romantic story within one or more of the author’s ships. Even on many websites, like fanfiction.net, the search is built to search characters one and two, who are the pairing.
While that sounds less than promising to the writing community, fanfiction can still be a challenge that helps a young writer grow. No one enjoys a fanfic with poor grammar or plot. Being ooc, or out of character is a huge turnoff to the reader. Not only beta readers, but also other readers will be quick to point this out in a comment, and usually they do so constructively.
Above all else though, it’s hard to fault fanfiction for being one of the only things motivating large numbers of teens to write on their own time. Writing is learned through practice.

Thanks for the response Lauren. Not sure that I fully understand ‘shipping’ – is it the original author’s pairing of characters or the fanfiction writer’s? – but I do agree that anything which encourages teenagers to write in their own time has to be a good thing.

I read your article with interest. I am an SF writer who teaches writing at university level. I’ve been writing fanfiction for about twenty years, and would not have a career in writing without it. Eleven years ago, I was happily writing fanfiction and posting it to the Internet to be read by a small circle of friends, when I received an email from the editor of a range of TV tie-in novels inviting me to pitch to the series. Hallelujah! This year will be my tenth in print.

At the start of each academic year, I introduce myself to new classes as an SF writer and a fanfiction writer, and I tell that story about my route to publication. There is always at least one student who reacts with absolute delight that her (usually her) hobby is not something to be shy about, or to feel she has to keep secret, or that it’s silly in some way. I’d like to think that this can be liberating for a young writer: to realise that she’s free to write whatever she likes, and perhaps to begin thinking about what she likes writing and why. As I think we all know, the best thing for anyone who wants to write is – to be writing! My message to students is simply: “It’s OK to write what you like to write, you’ll probably do a better job if you’re enjoying yourself, and here’s evidence that it’s not a waste of time. Shall we try stepping outside of your comfort zone?”

“Shipping” refers to a genre of stories, i.e. relationship-orientated stories, and can refer to relationships that already exist in the originating text, or relationships that the author and her readers have brought to or found latent in the text. I agree with the above commenter that a large proportion of fanfiction is character-orientated and, particularly, concerned with exploring relationships between characters – as is much of what we call literary fiction. More specifically, a great deal of fanfiction is quite short: vignette-length or shorter, written for quick challenges, or for entertainment, or perhaps simply to cheer up a friend. Many fanfiction writers do attempt projects of increasing complexity, particularly as they enter their early twenties (which is often when the first serious attempt at a novel happens). That was my own trajectory.

Una,
Thanks for your contribution – much appreciated! I think your story is not only interesting in itself but it also provides a very positive message for any aspiring young writer who may be starting out and needing a bit of a confidence boost. I will certainly be sharing it with others when the opportunity arises, which it most definitely will in the weeks and months ahead. Thanks also for clarifying the concept known as ‘shipping’ and good luck with your own writing.

Thanks, Bill! If I can bring clarification on any more fanfiction terminology, do feel free to ask! There is an excellent and very readable book on the subject by poet Sheenagh Pugh: The Democratic Genre.

Fanfic has some very interesting alleys – I don’t know if you’ve discovered them. I happen to know several people of my own age (!) who became friends through writing slash fanfic based on The Man from Uncle. I can’t say I found what I’ve seen to be interesting to anyone outside the fanbase, though – too much banal adherence to the canon for it to be ‘real’.

I must confess I haven’t really spent any time on the site Chris but thanks for taking the trouble to comment. My real interest was in the number of young people using fanfic to develop their writing outside of a formal educational context (school) and the extent to which their teachers may or may not be aware of it.
Bill